


better than ice cream.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Comfort Food, Emotional Eating, Ice Cream, M/M, sentimental drivel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 15:45:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1555655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ice cream can't help him now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	better than ice cream.

It's half-past one in the morning and Dean is standing in front of the refrigerator again.  He is starving and he doesn't know why.  He is opening and closing the vegetable drawer, the meat drawer, the tiny little rectangle of glass and plastic on the top of the refrigerator door where Sam seems to think the butter ought to go.  He doesn't know what he's looking for.  Just that he wants something. He wants something  _bad_.

He closes the refrigerator and opens the freezer and pushes around the packages of freezer-burned sausage and Hungry Man dinners and at the very bottom he finds a pint of half-eaten Ben & Jerry's coffee toffee bar crunch, and that's when it happens.

He sees the ice cream and thinks, God help me, I deserve this.

Which is funny. Because that's not a thought he can ever remember having before.  

He takes out the carton of ice cream and opens the lid.  The ice cream inside has almost reached the end of its life cycle.  The ice cream has thawed and been refrozen and then melted again.  There is a layer of ice crystals frosting the surface.

Dean eats it anyway.

\--

It's one a.m. and Dean is in the kitchen again.  He can't stop himself.  He wakes from dreams where he is lost, alone, starving; he has dreams of glancing in a mirror and seeing a man with hollow cheeks and hooded eyes, a man with bones that jut out, with ribs that curve out viciously from underneath his skin.  He sees a walking corpse with eyes like shadows, and it fills him with terror.  He wakes up gasping for breath, with a weakness running up and down his arms and legs, he wakes with a gnawing hunger in the pit of his stomach.  

He sits up in bed and shoves his fists in his eyes and thinks frantically, There's something missing in me. There's something wrong.  He doesn't know what it is he lacks, only that it must be some essential part of regular human makeup, some genetic marker that he was born without, some bit of stardust or clay, something numinous or solid, whatever it is that gives life or brings meaning to it.  Whatever it is that makes people good, he doesn't have it. He's never had it.

He sits at the kitchen table in the half-light of dawn and eats everything in sight.  He opens the pantry and eats potato chips and and popcorn and beef jerky, he rifles through the fridge and mixes granola in Sam's yogurt and eats that too.  He may not have any self-esteem to boast of, but at least he’s well-stocked with beer nuts and Vienna sausages and peanut butter M&Ms. 

He deserves this. Deserves to be miserable.  Deserves to be hungry. Deserves to starve.  He’s miserable, and he always has been, he can't remember a time when he hasn't awakened and felt a cold heavy weight settle down around his shoulders.

But for the first time, he’s starting to wonder if he should be.

Maybe there's nothing left in this world that he does deserve, not redemption or to eat off a complete set of uncracked white china place settings for once in his life or to wake up without guilt and shame and fear spiking through his blood, but maybe this. 

Maybe he deserves to be alive.  Maybe he deserves to live.

Maybe he deserves a snack.

He finds a stash of stale oatmeal cookies in the back of the pantry and he eats every last one of them, until there is nothing left but cookie dust and crumbs left on his fingers and mouth and shirt. His stomach pokes out over his jeans, but he still feels sort of shapeless, formless, just kind of hollow inside.  He feels like a jelly doughnut without the filling.  He feels like ice cream left out to thaw.  He feels like he is melting, going soft, changing inside, and it terrifies him because he doesn't know what he is becoming.

He eats and eats, and the shame starts creeping up his neck and face, a prickling heat on his skin.  He snatches a doughnut and shoves it into his mouth and chews ferociously, concentrating utterly on powdered sugar and fried fat until it’s all that he’s thinking about, doughnuts, cookies, Little Debbie snack cakes, Cosmic Brownies.

Then he stops.

No, he thinks. I deserve this, and he crumples up the plastic wrappings from the snack cakes in his hand and shoves them back in the box. 

 --

Dean is sitting on the kitchen floor eating ice cream from three different cartons. It’s tragic, if you think about from a human perspective. Hell, it’s tragic from any perspective.

He is sitting on the floor eating ice cream and worrying.  With every bite of ice cream, he is thinking of Cas. He takes a bite of mint-chocolate-chip and thinks about Cas in a ditch on the side of the road, crushed underneath that godawful Continental, mangled and torn apart. He eats giant spoonfuls of raspberry yogurt and thinks about Cas, stabbed in the chest, left for dead; he takes bites of pistachio and makes terrible faces around the taste of it in his mouth and thinks about the shade of red that Cas's blood makes when it's a dark stain on a street, when it's running in rivers down a sidewalk.  He eats ice cream until he's sick.

Cas calls him late one night, and he’s wide awake and bolting up in bed and his heart is pounding in his ears. Cas is saying his name, frantic and loud through the static, and he almost blacks out from fear.

"Dean," Cas is saying, "Dean—"

"Cas," he is snapping, "What’s wrong, are you okay, where are you-?" He is springing up, snatching at his wallet, his keys, reaching under the bed for his boots, and then, "Dean," Cas says again, much quieter, "Can you hear me?"

"Yeah, where are you-?”

Cass voice goes solid and steady.  "--Tunnel," Cas explains, and Dean feels like he’s just had several years taken off his life.

"Jesus  _Christ_ ,” Dean says weakly, and falls back on the bed, his limbs splayed out over the ruined covers and weak with relief. He lets Cas talk at him while he tries to recover. He lets his hand drift over his chest to hold his heart down firmly where it feels like it’s striving to rip through his chest.

"I’m on my way," Cas finishes, and the line cuts off.  Dean hits end call and lies on the bed with his hands over his eyes for a while. Then he becomes aware of a gnawing pit deep in his belly. He is so hungry that he is shaking, he can feel the tremors in his hands, fine little movements jerking under his skin.  He climbs out of bed and throws on his shoes and jacket and drives to the 24-hour Kroger in Lebannon and buys eggs and frosting and vegetable oil and a boxed package of Betty Crocker yellow cake mix.

When he gets back it’s close to two a.m. and Sam is waiting up in the kitchen, his hands folded on the old polished mahogany of the table.  He sits there and watches Dean silently unloading the eggs and vegetable oil and frosting from the plastic grocery bags.  Sam blinks at the cake mix.

"Are you okay?" he asks, reasonably.

"Peachy," Dean says, and slams cabinet doors open and shut as he pulls out mixing bowls and the ancient hand mixer that he still hasn’t remembered to replace with something more modern. Something electric, preferably.  But beating the batter is a relief. He shoves the cake in the oven and turns on the egg timer and turns around and there’s Sam, still there, holding the Betty Crocker box and looking concerned.

"Dean," he says slowly, "You don’t like cake. You like pie.”

Yeah, well, Dean wants to tell him, pie isn’t the answer for everything. Pie is to be served after dinner on a dessert plate or boxed up to go. Pie is everyday concerns and worries.  Pie doesn’t help you get over the sudden terrible fear that comes over you when you hear your best friend’s voice saying your name with what sounds like his final breath. Pie can’t save a life, Sam. Pie couldn’t bring him back. Neither can cake, but—. Well. Cas likes cake, anyway. If he makes it home alive he can have a piece.

Dean stays up until the egg timer goes off.  He takes the cake out of the oven and sticks toothpicks in the middle and loses two of them inside the cake.  He stays up and waits until the cake has cooled and he spreads layers of frosting over the top and sides, feeling the cellphone in his pants pocket bump against the handles on the drawers under the counter.  

He waits. 

He adds another layer of frosting and eats the rest out of the can, and when he's licked the final bits of icing off his fingers he takes out a knife and slices up the cake.  And waits. Cas still isn't there.  So he eats.

He eats cake until his stomach hurts and he keeps eating well after that.  He eats until he feels disgusting, the worst he's ever felt, and when he goes back to his bedroom he still can’t sleep, so he gets down on his hands and knees on the cold concrete floor and does push-ups until his head starts buzzing, until the muscles in his shoulders and arms are shaking with the effort, until he can roll over and collapse on his back and stare up at the ceiling with spots of black dancing over his vision.

He lies there panting and wondering if he deserves this.  This fear.  He wonders if this is a punishment for everything he has done, all the suffering he has caused.  He has committed terrible crimes.  He has committed them with his own two hands.  He closes his eyes and sees red. Cas's blood. Sam's.  No one deserves to be so afraid. No one deserves this, he tells himself.  No one deserves to live with that kind of fear. 

I deserve a life without fear, he says to himself, and he feels strange all over, a sort of wildness that touches his soul from the thought of living a life where he is unafraid, where he is free from nightmares and panic and the vice that holds him back from going after what he wants, free from whatever it is that holds his tongue heavy and still every time he finds that there is something he wants to say.

\--

Cas exists in the spaces between Dean and Sam, but he doesn't really live there: He spends the night on the top bunk of an abandoned bunk bed in a storage room.  He borrows Dean's shirts and always asks before he takes one.  He uses his own soap and shampoo, the tiny samples that come in plastic squares in the mail that he gets out of inserts in women's catalogs.  

Cas will eat everything on his plate, everything from meatloaf to Hamburger Helper to boiled cabbage, and when he is finished eating he'll drag his fork across his plate and lick the remnants off.  Dean will ask him if he wants seconds and Cas will say, If there's enough.  Dean will ask him what he wants for dinner, what his favorite meal is, and Cas will say Anything.  I'll eat anything, Dean, and every time he says that it splits Dean's heart in half.

He sees it, though, this hunger of Cas's that goes unfulfilled. When he opens the freezer and sees that Cas has made sure not to eat the last breakfast burrito, but has instead left it for Dean or Sam.  When they are on the road and debating whether or not to stop for lunch and Cas is silent in the backseat. 

"Can you wait?" Sam is asking, turning in his seat to glance behind him.  "Just a little while longer?"

"Yeah," Cas says, his voice flat and emotionless, and something in his tone reminds Dean of himself, sneaking out of bed and into the kitchen late at night, starving and ashamed of it. Dean glances at him in the rear view mirror. Cas’s head is propped up on one elbow, his chin is sinking slowly down towards his chest.  His eyes are closed.  

He takes a hand off the steering wheel and gropes around inside the pockets of his jacket and finally retrieves an opened bag of peanut M&Ms, and he sticks his hand behind his seat and feels around. His fingers brush against Cas’s left leg, he can feel the warmth from Cas’s skin under his hands.  He pats Cas’s knee, and Cas stirs.  ”Hey,” he says, and finally feels Cas’s fingers hesitantly reaching out to grab his hand.  

"Here," he says, and passes Cas back a handful of the M&Ms, pressing each piece of candy into his hand, one by one: a red, a green one, a brown one, and Cas puts each one in his mouth as Dean hands them over.  He passes Cas M&Ms for the next ten miles, and with each one he puts in Cas's hand he makes a wish, like blowing out a candle on a birthday cake: I wish you'd just ask. I wish you thought you belonged. I wish you had never been hungry, not once.  He feeds Cas M&Ms until they reach the next exit, and then he turns into the first MacDonald's he sees and orders Cas a Happy Meal.

\-- 

Cas catches him in the middle of one of his late-night snacking binges.  He's sort of embarrassed. Sort of. Actually he kind of wants to die.  He is stuffing his face with heath bar crunch and Cas is standing there in the doorway of the kitchen, blinking at Dean in the dim glow coming from the lightbulb over the stove.    

"How are you doing?" Cas asks him, and Dean shoves a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth and kind of mumbles around it and snaps, "Fine.”  He looks Cas up and down, takes in the rumpled red hoodie and the dark shadows under his eyes and he is feeling so sad and achy and hungry that he adds, “How are you?”

"Fine," says Cas, sadly.  They stand there a moment, staring silently at each other, until the ice cream in Dean’s spoon starts melting and Cas starts staring past him, at the fridge.  "Are you hungry?" Dean asks.

Cas hesitates, and there is goes, Dean's fragile heart is breaking all over again.  "Can I make a sandwich?"

"Yeah," Dean says, wearily, "of course you can," but Cas doesn't look comfortable.  He watches Cas move around the kitchen slowly, hesitantly.  Cas is taking bread and peanut butter from the pantry, he is opening the refrigerator and staring inside thoughtfully.  He glances back at Dean.

"Eat whatever you want,' Dean tells him, and then Cas is finally taking out jelly and jam and preserves. He watches Cas screwing off the lid of the peanut butter and scraping a butter knife along the insides of the jar, then spreading heaping, drifting layers of peanut butter over his bread.  He takes out three spoons from the cutlery drawer and doles out grape jelly, apple butter, strawberry preserves.  He adds, as an afterthought, a thin layer of honey all over everything.

"Wow," he says, when Cas is done.

Cas gets it, he finds himself thinking. Cas has been hungry too.  Different pictures present themselves to him, one after another: Cas walking around the parking lot of a Burger King, picking up coins, darting under the drive-through window to collect stray quarters and nickles and dimes; Cas buying beef jerky to keep in the pockets of his coat in order to have something to chew on slowly when his stomach is taunt with hunger; Cas picking through trash cans behind restaurants, going through crumpled, greasy take-out bags with someone’s leftover chicken chow mein or a half-eaten hamburger left in some kid’s discarded Happy Meal.  Thinking about crap like that makes his stomach turn over, churning madly, and Dean has to put another spoon full of ice cream in his mouth to make himself feel better.  But it doesn’t really work. He still feels rotten.

Cas goes and sits at the kitchen table beside him, disconsolately nibbling on his peanut butter and jelly sandwich and it strikes Dean, then, that somehow Cas has learned to do what he’s always done when he feels tired or guilty or immeasurably sad. Eat until you feel better.  Eat until you feel just a little less empty.

He watches Cas eat his sandwich slowly, one tiny bite at a time until he finishes one half of the sandwich. Cas wraps the other half in cellophane and sticks it way back in the far corner of the fridge, hidden by bottles of ketchup and mayo, and Dean has a sudden memory, of being eleven years old and hiding a box of slim jims in his duffel bag where Sam couldn't find them, of sneaking to the bathroom to eat one so Sam wouldn't find of. Of feeling awful about it the next day. Of giving Sam the remainder of the slim jims so the guilt would go away. Only it hadn't.  He still feels bad about it. That's one thing that never goes away, that residue of guilt. It settles in the pit of his stomach, keeps him from ever feeling full.

So on the next night when Dean sneaks into the kitchen at midnight and finds Cas already there, sitting at the table with another stolen sandwich in front of him, Dean goes to him.  Cas is looking up at him, guilty and furtive and it hurts him, it hits him right in the center of his chest.  He bends over Cas and takes Cas’s hands and presses them down on the table, hard. “This is your home,” he says.  “This is your table. This is your chair. That’s your bread and your peanut butter and your honey.  Got it?”

He is standing over Cas, he can feel the heat radiating through Cas’s thin t-shirt and hoodie, he can feel Cas barely breathing.  “Yeah,” Cas says eventually. “I got it.”

“Good,” Dean says, and lets go of his hands.  He’s thinking of saying, Nobody wants you here more than I do. No one wants you here more.  No one  _wants you more_  than I do. I want. I want  _you._  The words sit there on his tongue.  He feels like he is being suffocated. He can't. He can't.

"Why don't you just ask for what you want?" Dean says finally, and Cas moves away.  

"Why don't you?" Cas asks right back, and Dean can't move, he's frozen in place and at the same time he feels like he's melting on the inside, something inside him is falling apart and leaving only a soft new skin in place of the calloused shell he's worn like a coat for years.

After that conversation he goes back to the kitchen and eats all the leftovers in the fridge, the last of the Mexican takeout from last night, the last bites of Sam's Pollo Loco, the beans and rice and pico de gallo and sour cream. Finally he puts the lids back on the ice cream cartons and loads them back in the fridge and slinks away, feeling guilty and hunted.

He lies awake in bed and he keeps thinking, amazed and incredulous and astounded, I am so unhappy.  I am so miserable. And I don't think I deserve it.  I don't deserve to be so unhappy.  I just don't.  I don't deserve to feel like this.  

\--

Dean finds himself in the kitchen at one a.m. again, camped out at the floor in front of the refrigerator, shoveling vast spoonfuls of Neapolitan ice cream in his mouth.  Neapolitan, because that’s the only kind of ice cream in the fridge.  Neapolitan, even though he really only likes vanilla ice cream these days.  Neapolitan, because yesterday he had been pushing a shopping cart past the frozen goods section at the grocery store and he had thought, I bet Cas would like that.  He had opened the freezer door and took out the five-gallon tub of Great Value vanilla-chocolate-strawberry-spliced ice cream and he put it in the buggy and it struck him then, maybe, that he is in love.  He loves Cas so much that he’ll buy Cas shitty Neapolitan ice cream even though he can’t stand it.

He has slowly been coming to the realization that there isn't much he wouldn't do for Cas.  He's not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the way it stopped being about what Dean wanted from him, what Dean required from him, Dean's needs, in all those variegated hues: Cas's help.  Cas's trust.  Cas's loyalty. His attention. His love, even.  But now it's simpler than that. Dean can choke down every last thing he wants from Cas until those wants and needs and hopes rest uneasy in the darkest corners of his heart, instead, want things  _for_  Cas. For Cas to be alive, walking and talking and breathing, for him to be okay. For Cas to be at peace, if there's any kind of peace out there to be found.  For Cas to find whatever it is that he hopes for and dreams about and needs.

Cas deserves to get what he needs.  Cas deserves to get what he wants.  He deserves more than this.  He deserves better.  

Dean stares down at the spoon in his hand and wonders when that happened, why that happened, how he could go on all the days of his life, still stuck here on the kitchen floor with a carton of ice cream in his hand, drowning all that love with junk food, just because he doesn’t just want Cas. He wants what’s best for him. What’s right for him. Dean wants a life for Cas that is full of joy. Even if that means he’s not a part of it.

He sits on the floor and eats ice cream and counts the ways he would love Cas, if he could.  He would bring him joy, if he could, and happiness besides. He would give him peace. He would let Cas go.

He puts down the spoon on the lid of the carton, very very carefully, and puts his head in his hands. Because ice cream can’t help him now.  

He sits there for a long time, feeling his fingers digging into his hair, his hands hot and sticky covering his eyes, thinking, I’d do it. I could. I could let him walk away.

He is still sitting there when he hears Cas creep in.  He takes his hands away from his face and looks up at Cas's concerned, handsome face.  "What are you doing?" Cas is asking. He looks so worried, and Dean can't stand it.

"Wallowing," Dean explains.  Cas slides down and sits on the floor next to him. His shoulder is there, leaning against Dean's, and it's so nice, so nice.  Dean wants to close his eyes again and stay like this, with Cas warm and there beside him.  

"Is it effective?" Cas asks.

"Not really," Dean tells him, and together they sit on the floor and watch the half-gallon of ice cream slowly puddling up in the center of the tub, at the melting swirls of chocolate and strawberry and vanilla all mixing together.  

"Neapolitan," Cas says. "My favorite."

"I know," Dean says gloomily. He knows Cas isn't going to ask, even though he's staring at the spoon in Dean's hand with those hungry eyes of his, so he hands Cas the spoon, and Cas dips it into the carton. He takes careful bites, like he has encountered the severe and all-encompassing pain of sinking your teeth directly into flavored frozen stuff in some ancient, distant past and has been cautious ever since. "Why Neapolitan?" Dean asks.

Cas nibbles delicately on the edge of the spoon, and Dean watches him. "I like having a choice." 

He dips his spoon back inside the tub and takes giant spoonfuls of ice cream: he chooses strawberry, then vanilla, then strawberry again.  Cas is frowning, the corners of his mouth pinched tight and unhappy.  “Do you want to talk about it?” Dean asks.

“No,” Cas says.  He leans his head on Dean’s shoulder.  "Why are we eating ice cream?" Cas asks.

"Because you don't deserve this," Dean says.  He feels wretched and he doesn't know why.  “You don’t deserve this,” he says, and Cas raises his head.  “You got a raw deal.  It's not fair to you."

Cas puts the spoon down.  He is still and tense by Dean's side.  “What do I deserve, then?”

There are a thousand words stuck in his throat.  What does Cas deserve? To be loved. Cherished. Treasured. He tries to breathe around the words. Cas deserves it all. And he deserves to hear it.  "Everything,” Dean says.  Everything in the world. Everything in the entire goddamned universe and more. “Everything.”

Cas is looking at him, so intently, and Dean doesn't know what it means.  “And what do you deserve, Dean?” he asks.

Dean opens his mouth. And closes it. And opens it again.  

What does he want?

He doesn't want to be miserable.  He wants to be happy. He wants to love someone. He wants someone to love him back.  And for better or worse, he wants the same for Cas, even more than he wants it for himself. And then the words start tumbling out of his mouth.  

“I deserve to be happy.  I deserve to have a chance to go after the crap that I want. And I deserve to have a shot at. Something more.  I deserve a good life.

"And I want to share that with you," he says, and Cas hands him the spoon.  He stares down at the soft melting ice cream.   "Not that," he says stupidly.  He takes a bite anyway. It’s mostly vanilla, with some strawberry edging its way in. "Okay. Well. Maybe that too. I meant everything, Cas. I want to share everything with you."

"I think," Cas is saying, slowly, in a voice so new and tender that Dean thinks of buds unfurling in the early hours of morning, of petals curled around the soft centers, of something rich and strange and wonderful growing inside that melting heart of his the way flowers burst into bloom, "that what we really deserve is each other."

"You do?" he asks.

"I do," Cas says, with certainty.

He kisses Cas there on the floor and lets ice cream melt around them.


End file.
